By the exaggerated colors and lines of the facial make-up to portray the characters of the roles, offer praise of goodness and condemnation of badness, is part of the make-up of Chinese opera. Facial make-up is primarily used for various characters of two types of roles: ching and chou.Sheng and Tan seldom use make-up, but rather put on some powder and ink. Based on absorbing the merits of make-up from various local operas and added innovation, make-up then were fully developed. Patterns and colors are gradually abundant, distinctions of various types of characters are more vivid, and further created plenty make-ups for historic and mythological characters, and eventually formed a set of complete make-up patterns.
◎Drawing of the Facial Make-up

According to the portraying and drawing methods, make-up is divided into three basic types: Rou, Gou, and Mo.
1.Rou Face: solemn and military-like, with one complete color, and emphasizing the shape and wave of five senses to be realized. It is a very ancient facial make-up type.
2.Gou Face: colorful and with rich patterns, complicated and beautiful, some even with silver and gold powdered; it is splendid.
3.Mo Face: mostly light colors, by powders on the face not to let the real face show to others, in order to cast the deceived personality of bad person.

◎Colors of the Facial Make-up

Colors of the facial make-up look like colorful. Each color not only represent faithfulness, badness, goodness, and evilness, but the features of the character.

Red-colored face: general: loyal and heroic, mostly positive roles. Others: ironic meaning, representing Hippocratic;

Special case: elder man representing young lush still there, or bad guy did some good things.

Black-colored face: general: straightforward and determined, braved and wise. Others: representing In in the In-Iang used as ghost; darker skin or ugly face.

White-colored face: general: tricky believed only in oneself. Others: monks or eunuch facial make-up, representing old man.

Purple-colored face: general: righteous and heroic, not lean to authorities. Other: bad-facial look and ugly.

Pink-colored face: old and lack of blood person.

Yellow-colored face: fierce and brave bur easy to loose temper.

Golden-colored face: general: god and fairy with high wisdom. Others: brave military general.

Silver-colored face: fairy and monster.

Green-colored face: ordinary: brave, ruthless. Others: civil heroes.

Blue-colored face: strong and with dark mind.

Red face: U Guan	Black face: Zheng Bao	White face: Cao Cao	Purple face: Ge Chang	Pink face: Ping Wen
Yellow face: Cheng Du U-Wen	Golden face: Money Leopard	Silver face: Ping Guan	Green face: Shig-Ing Xu	Blue face: Wu Ma

◎Patterns of the Facial Make-up

The patterns of facial make-up are abundant. They are primarily divided as forehead patterns, eyebrow type patterns, eyelid patterns, nose patterns, mouth cross patterns, and lower mouth patterns. Each part of the patterns is changeable. Such as:

The black forehead of Zheng Pao has a white new moon, representing justice and integrity.	Forehead of Liang Meng has a red calabash, representing this person loved drinking wine.	Jian Yang draws Zhong Wen with three eyes, originated from a classic legend.	Jiant Spirit God, Frightening God and Money Leopard all have many faces to portrait their ghost-like monster features.
Forehead of the seventh son of the Yang’s family has a Chinese character “tiger”, representing his brave and without enermy.	Kuang- In Zhao’s dragon eyebrow representing him as the real Empire of the human dragon.	Thunder God’ face draws with a thunder lighting wave.	Wui Jiang’s forehead draws In-Yang picture, representing his clever calculations.
Eyelid of General Chun in the Xia Dynasty had been wounded by arrow, therefore drawn with a red spot.	Er-Dun Dou and others with military solemn, on their faces, normally drawn weapons of their most good at.	Toad was drawn on Ian-Zhang Wang’s head to represent his former life was a water animal.	Gong-Ming Zhao was drawn money on his face, representing he is a Fortune God.

These colors with different meaning drawn on different pattern framework, have characterized the characters. There are many interesting facial make-up, just to wait for you to be acquainted.
◎Types of the Facial Make-up

Facial make-up is colorful and with various patterns, easy to let people feel chaotic and mysterious. However, in fact, Facial make-up can be inducted into certain basic types. Through these basic types and the character and temperament, they may evolve plenty facial make-ups. Each of them is based on the looking and character of the role in the opera.

Zheng Face

Features: The entire face is with one color, not erected, very straightforward, and easy to draw with few patterns. Such type should be happened in the earliest stage.

Character: Characters draw such facial type are positive ones with more integrated personality and higher social status.

 

 

Lao Face

Features: also named as “six section divided face,” normally used for elder men. Why it is called “six section divided face,” partly because the picture is simple, like a Chinese character “six,” another saying means the major color occupies 6/10 of the entire face.

Character: Characters who draws such face are mostly elderly and senior high-ranking officials with their solemn image.

 

San Kuai Ua

Features: It is named by widen and lengthen three parts: eyebrow, eye and nose, to let the entire face be divided into three chunks. It requires symmetry. In the opera, such face is drawn most of the time and with variety. It can be divided into four kinds: Straight San Kuai Ua is used to represent loyal brave persons, pointed San Kuai Ua represents more complicated persons, both brave and evil demanding. Patterned San Kuai Ua mostly civil good guys and tough middle military officials, and elderly San Kuai Ua is used to represent very old elderly man, both positive and negative.

 

Shi Ze Men Face

Features: Developed from San Kuai Ua, some said evolved from “six section divided face.” The feature is to shrink the major color to a small color strip, from moon gate straightforwardly draws to the lower part of the nose tip. By using this color strip, it symbolizes the character of the role. It is named by the major color strip and the eyelid forms a cross in the picture frame.

Character: Normally positive figures of hero or military generals.

Broken Face

Features: It is gradually evolved by two types of facial make-ups: San Kuai Ua and Shi Ze Men Face, with plenty patterns and complicated colors. It is the most beautiful patterns, and the most faraway facial type from the original human kind.

Character: Mostly middle level military generals or officials, or robberies in the civil society.

 

Erected Face

Features: the right and left side of the entire face are asymmetry, with five senses erected.

Character: It represents injustice of mindset and evil and tough-headed. However, there are people who have such look but not necessarily bad persons. Meantime, it symbolizes people with ugly faces or bad behaviors.

 

 

Po Face

Features: close to the Erected Face, but somewhat different. For Erected Face, the two sides of face is drawn differently; but the Po Face is represented by features.

Character: there are biological or personality defects for the character; as to the biological defects, it is somewhat similar to the so-called “broken face” of Chinese facial logy.

 

Imagery Face

Features: Mostly as monster faces; for fairy gods are golden faces, and monsters are evil types.

Character: Due to the mythological characters are emphasized on the colors and lines, rather than characters.

 

 

 

Powder White Evil Face

Features: also called “watery white face,” because of it used white powder and water to spread on the face, rather than using oil color. From the development of the facial make-up for chou roles, it is the latest development type in the entire facial make-ups.

Character: character with such face, on the one hand, it is to cover the person’s real face for his degree of mockery; on the other hand, it is to show the bloodless cruel image of the person. Most of the time, it portrays the important high rank officials in the history.

Reference:
Sorted by the research team from Guoguang Opera Company http://www.kk.gov.tw/
Source of Photos:
Guoguang Opera Company http://www.kk.gov.tw/
The Website of Chinese Way to Go http://chinesewaytogo.org/teachers_corner/culture/hsu/operaface.php

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